If the behavior at Gamestop represents the behavior of an average consumer and of an average game retailer, then that means the same thing happens at other game stores. So yes, that would be near 17% across the board. And Gamestop is one of the largest game retailers out there, so they do statistically represent a large fraction of how the trade-in gaming industry operates.
Stores like Target and Walmart sell new games but don't take trade-ins. Plus it doesn't account for on line sale channels like Steam, where trading doesn't work at all. But all together, game stores that accept trades do have a big impact on the industry. Quibbling over a percent or two of correctness from the slashdot submitter isn't the point: the point is that used game trade-ins matter.
It's good that Mozilla puts it's users' interests right up there or even ahead of the interests of media companies.
Seconded. I really appreciate that Firefox still hangs on to that independence. I can't imagine Google will forever allow Chrome to evade data collection by google-analytics.js. People who use google's tools seem to forget that they are the product, not the customer.
Like you, I also am loaded up on annoyance blocking tools, and add NoScript, Ghostery, Element Hiding, and some Greasemonkey scripts to AdBlock Plus. For the most part, most pages still work fine, but it's not perfect, and not for everyone, but it keeps me sane.
While that's OK for some people, it's not a practical answer for most corporate machines. Imagine a company that has 2GB laptops issued to their entire sales team, with a thousand machines scattered across the country. That's a million dollars worth of machines that are on a fixed depreciation schedule. They aren't planning on replacing or upgrading any of those machines until 2015. There's no budget for it. What are they to do?
Worse, what are they to do if each rapid release iteration places more and more demands on the end user's hardware? At some point they have to stop the losses, and the answer may be a switch to a browser that isn't asking for 2GB.
Ever been to a conference or trade show here in the US? Other than DEFCON, it's not all that unusual for the venue to require their trade booth vendors and attendees to turn off their own wifi access points to enable the show's official wireless network to operate without interference. They just don't walk around with $25,000 radio direction finders to enforce it.
Amsterdam built their own white elephant way back in 1928. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Stadium_(Amsterdam) It's now a historic monument that hosts a few events here and there, but after 84 years of searching for a purpose, it's still good for very little. At least you Quebecois had a baseball team squatting in yours for a couple of years, paying a few of the bills.
So there you go, London. When you start having trouble paying off the loans on these billion-pound arenas, just remember that in 84 years you still won't have made your money back. Congratulations!
You should be wary anyway. Just picking the researchers introduces a bias. Imagine an oil company funding two studies on seal research, and paying Greenpeace for one study, and Halibuton's House'O'Research for the other. From that point on, they could be scrupulously fair, paying both the same amount, and without asking anything more than "are Arctic seals doing better or worse since the Exxon Valdez incident?" I would suspect the results probably wouldn't correlate well (although it would be interesting to see.)
If they funded both studies and published both results together, I would have more confidence in the results. But if they were to sponsor just one study from John's Research, Inc., would you know the biases of JRI? Would it be believable? Or how would you know that the JRI study is the only study they conducted? I have heard of cases where multiple studies were originally funded, but the patron later suppressed the unfavorable results. The case of levothyroxin comes to mind, but I'm not sure that's the whole story.
It's enforceable, just not technically. (If it were technically possible, they could automate it.) Have a corporate policy that says "Thou shalt not use thy corporate password outside of the corporation's computer systems, or thou shalt be fired." Then when a publicly visible violation occurs, you invoke the penalty clause in a public fashion, so that everyone can see you take the policy very seriously.
Ask the Apple guy who lost the prototype iPhone 4 about the experience. Then ask a current Apple employee if he'd consider violating corporate secrecy policies. It's pretty obvious that the policies can be effective, if not perfectly enforceable.
It's heartless and ugly and cruel, but putting your employer's good name at risk is a Big Deal. Dropbox might lose paying clients over this. That means less profit, which can lead to budget cuts, headcount reductions, or worse. All those dirty realities of operating a business come into play.
The lecture is "whoops, we just learned that we got hacked this way, just like everyone else said would happen about 10 years ago, so we're passing the lesson onwards to you."
The real takeaway is "we are about 10 years behind everyone else in security." Which is a shame, because I really like Dropbox.
But it's like using any service provider - you're putting your eggs in someone else's basket. So when they trip and drop them, don't act all surprised and outraged, because you are the one who chose to use them.
The major labels didn't put out all million songs in the DB. This music is sourced from everywhere, including indies of every flavor, regardless of popularity.
Besides, this study is analyzing 50 years, not just the start.
Damn, am I really defending the labels here? Something must be wrong with my argument. Perhaps you are suggesting that the labels shaped too many habits in the beginning, and now this is all just learned behavior?
So there's some possible causality for you - perhaps we can blame the internet, iTunes and the Genius, and genre-specific streams for suggesting "more of the same". Without a broader exposure to different inputs from diverse genres, musicians aren't breaking as far out of their own genres, contributing to the sameness.
No, the Kochs are the same billionaires. They must have either figured out a way to monetize global warming, perhaps through an environment-monitoring division, or figured out that most people would rather have oil than a stable atmosphere.
Or maybe their foundation accidentally backed the wrong science. Even billionaires can hire people who make mistakes.
One cool thing about modern equipment is it makes Test Driven Development possible. Crank in a tiny change, and check it instantly. Your turnaround is a few seconds, and refactoring makes you improve as you go. Not that you shouldnt be smart, but you're leveraging the compiler to do syntax checking instead of an overnight drop-n-pray process.
The bow is kind of a good idea, as far as safety for the family goes. A compound bow with a 70/45# draw will keep kids (and many untrained adults) from being able to wield it. And it's not like you have to use a broadhead to cow a burglar into submission with it. A target tip would still scare the snot out of anyone it is pointed at.
Of course, they're not terribly convenient in tight spaces.
I service a CNC machine at a machine shop that STILL uses paper tape. I am the only guy that will touch the old hardware so I get paid $150 an hour to tinker with the stuff. Hell they cant find a IT company that can handle DOS so I also pick up the other old machines.
I love it, 1 long afternoon/evening there and I go home with $1000 in my pocket.
This bothers me. You could easily replace the paper tape reader with a computer based solution - all the paper tape readers we had on our CNC machines 25+ years ago were interfaced with ordinary DB-25 RS-232 connections. Back then I just stuck a BlackBox short-haul modem on them to run the wires back to the foreman's office, where the other modem was plugged into an original IBM PC. A simple GW-BASIC serial program allowed them to load and store their programs to a hard disk, which was backed up nightly. It wasn't rocket surgery back then, and I have to believe the state of the art has advanced a little bit in offering hardware and software choices to do this today.
A Raspberry Pi and software from sourceforge would cost less than an hour of your time, and would open them up to lots of possibilities, not the least of which is insurance against something unfortunate happening to their only support person.
Going back one ice age. ReallY? That's a quarter as useful a going back all the way. Geez.
I should have actually said two ice ages, counting the Little Ice Age. And that was significant because it gave them two sample events to compare against the other physical evidence, not just one. Plus they were able to calibrate their shallowest samples against the last hundred years of very detailed and scientifically measured global weather data.
But yeah, they found that as their drills reached closer to bedrock, the core temperature of the Earth was warming the ice from below, significantly altering the directly measured ice temperature data. So the rest of the record of previous ice ages is derived from archaeological, geological and paleological evidence.
Anyway, it's so cool that they were able to figure this stuff out that it still amazes me.
Separately, we have a saying in India, which is drilled into the brains of BPO trainees. It says; 10=35. The IQ of an average 10-year old Indian kid is about the same as the IQ of the average 35-yr old American. Reading the many infantile responses to this article, I begin to suspect this might not be far from the truth.
Please keep in mind that a call center worker's viewpoint starts by seeing the worst of everyone. The callers are not calling 1-800-SUCCESS, they are calling 1-800-FAILURE. They have already been disappointed by whatever the product did (or didn't) do. Coupled with the fact that so many companies are using Indian call centers (because Indian English is actually quite good), and so many help desk scripts are inadequate at solving the problems they were created to handle (not the fault of the guy answering the phone), a lot of Americans have developed an association where the clipped accent means serious disappointment - fair or not, it's where we are.
Does that give one human the right to treat another like shit? Of course not. Do they? Of course - they are selfish and rude as hell around here all day long, whether they are in a movie theater being entertained or just walking down the street. I wouldn't expect them to improve their attitudes in the middle of a product failure. I wish it were different, and I raised my son to be better than that, but we can't fix everyone.
So on behalf of a minority of Americans, here's a collective "sorry".
Things constantly improve on all sides, including the quality and sophistication of attacks. But people naturally want to hang onto the old ideas in their heads, partly because they're not close to the "other" system, and partly because they don't like having their old decisions questioned or their assumptions challenged. The "Macs are perfect" idea is again proven faulty, but so are the Mac and Unix people who assign the same amount of failure to Windows 7 that they saw with Windows XP a decade ago.
It's not that Macs are "equally guilty as Windows" or that "Windows 7 is now perfect". It's just a perception thing. Human nature means that we can expect a ton of gloating and "I told you so!" kinds of responses. And while that doesn't mean a PR department is necessarily behind it, I can understand why a PR department would latch onto this and amplify it.
We had a similar problem. The security guy (not the maintenance guy) hooked up a Palm Pilot (ok, Handspring Visor) to a similarly hidden port to pop it open. He also had to set a magnet on the top of the safe, which I suspect triggered a reed switch or hall effect transistor.
thank you, at least someone gets it. We have only been keeping detailed weather records for around 100 years and now were supposed to believe that this is the hottest its ever been, thats crazy.
No, he doesn't "get it". Have you never heard of paleoclimatology? Scientists down in Antarctica have sampled cores of ice that have been trapped for millennia, and have been able to correlate the temperatures of the ice as well as trapped atmospheric particles with the time they were trapped. From them, they have determined an approximation of the average global temperature back through time, as well as estimates of things like the percentage of Earth's surface covered by wetlands based on methane levels indicating decomposed bacteria.
The Antarctic ice sheet has a pretty good record going all the way back to the previous ice age and a bit earlier. It's not like an almanac, where they can ask "what was the temperature on July 4th, 4004 BC", but they can see slow moving trends. For example, they can see a small dip that correlates to the Little Ice Age, and a more dramatic dip from an earlier ice age.
And the ice sheets aren't the only evidence. Geological records also contain clues about the earlier weather, in the forms of rock scratchings where they were pushed by glaciers, glacial moraines, ancient dried lake beds, etc. And the distribution of fossils can show where climates went from "hospitable" to "inhospitable" to certain forms of ancient life.
It's just the kind of data you need to have if you are trying to figure out if this decade is warmer than all previous decades in the last 40,000 years.
There is nothing crazy about it. It's just science.
I've never testified in front of a jury in a courtroom before, but I have heard and answered all kinds of stupid questions when giving depositions. Some are so ludicrous you have to wonder if the guy asking them is a real lawyer. So don't try to tell me what kinds of nonsense I will or won't hear coming from a lawyer - they have no problem spouting it.
Third. I only spend about a month per year in hotels, but I've never lost anything to the staff, and on every occasion I've accidentally left something behind, they have all always been great about returning it to me.
And yes, a gratuity to the housekeeping staff is always a good idea.
Slashdot Mirror
If the behavior at Gamestop represents the behavior of an average consumer and of an average game retailer, then that means the same thing happens at other game stores. So yes, that would be near 17% across the board. And Gamestop is one of the largest game retailers out there, so they do statistically represent a large fraction of how the trade-in gaming industry operates.
Stores like Target and Walmart sell new games but don't take trade-ins. Plus it doesn't account for on line sale channels like Steam, where trading doesn't work at all. But all together, game stores that accept trades do have a big impact on the industry. Quibbling over a percent or two of correctness from the slashdot submitter isn't the point: the point is that used game trade-ins matter.
It's good that Mozilla puts it's users' interests right up there or even ahead of the interests of media companies.
Seconded. I really appreciate that Firefox still hangs on to that independence. I can't imagine Google will forever allow Chrome to evade data collection by google-analytics.js. People who use google's tools seem to forget that they are the product, not the customer.
Like you, I also am loaded up on annoyance blocking tools, and add NoScript, Ghostery, Element Hiding, and some Greasemonkey scripts to AdBlock Plus. For the most part, most pages still work fine, but it's not perfect, and not for everyone, but it keeps me sane.
While that's OK for some people, it's not a practical answer for most corporate machines. Imagine a company that has 2GB laptops issued to their entire sales team, with a thousand machines scattered across the country. That's a million dollars worth of machines that are on a fixed depreciation schedule. They aren't planning on replacing or upgrading any of those machines until 2015. There's no budget for it. What are they to do?
Worse, what are they to do if each rapid release iteration places more and more demands on the end user's hardware? At some point they have to stop the losses, and the answer may be a switch to a browser that isn't asking for 2GB.
Ever been to a conference or trade show here in the US? Other than DEFCON, it's not all that unusual for the venue to require their trade booth vendors and attendees to turn off their own wifi access points to enable the show's official wireless network to operate without interference. They just don't walk around with $25,000 radio direction finders to enforce it.
JON-A-THON! JON-A-THON!
I've noticed we keep looking to movies as mindless popcorn entertainment, yet they have this nasty habit where they keep showing us the future.
Amsterdam built their own white elephant way back in 1928. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Stadium_(Amsterdam)
It's now a historic monument that hosts a few events here and there, but after 84 years of searching for a purpose, it's still good for very little. At least you Quebecois had a baseball team squatting in yours for a couple of years, paying a few of the bills.
So there you go, London. When you start having trouble paying off the loans on these billion-pound arenas, just remember that in 84 years you still won't have made your money back. Congratulations!
And we jokingly call our data center the "Large Software Collider". Not as funny when the real thing is even bigger!
You should be wary anyway. Just picking the researchers introduces a bias. Imagine an oil company funding two studies on seal research, and paying Greenpeace for one study, and Halibuton's House'O'Research for the other. From that point on, they could be scrupulously fair, paying both the same amount, and without asking anything more than "are Arctic seals doing better or worse since the Exxon Valdez incident?" I would suspect the results probably wouldn't correlate well (although it would be interesting to see.)
If they funded both studies and published both results together, I would have more confidence in the results. But if they were to sponsor just one study from John's Research, Inc., would you know the biases of JRI? Would it be believable? Or how would you know that the JRI study is the only study they conducted? I have heard of cases where multiple studies were originally funded, but the patron later suppressed the unfavorable results. The case of levothyroxin comes to mind, but I'm not sure that's the whole story.
It's enforceable, just not technically. (If it were technically possible, they could automate it.) Have a corporate policy that says "Thou shalt not use thy corporate password outside of the corporation's computer systems, or thou shalt be fired." Then when a publicly visible violation occurs, you invoke the penalty clause in a public fashion, so that everyone can see you take the policy very seriously.
Ask the Apple guy who lost the prototype iPhone 4 about the experience. Then ask a current Apple employee if he'd consider violating corporate secrecy policies. It's pretty obvious that the policies can be effective, if not perfectly enforceable.
It's heartless and ugly and cruel, but putting your employer's good name at risk is a Big Deal. Dropbox might lose paying clients over this. That means less profit, which can lead to budget cuts, headcount reductions, or worse. All those dirty realities of operating a business come into play.
The lecture is "whoops, we just learned that we got hacked this way, just like everyone else said would happen about 10 years ago, so we're passing the lesson onwards to you."
The real takeaway is "we are about 10 years behind everyone else in security." Which is a shame, because I really like Dropbox.
But it's like using any service provider - you're putting your eggs in someone else's basket. So when they trip and drop them, don't act all surprised and outraged, because you are the one who chose to use them.
The major labels didn't put out all million songs in the DB. This music is sourced from everywhere, including indies of every flavor, regardless of popularity.
Besides, this study is analyzing 50 years, not just the start.
Damn, am I really defending the labels here? Something must be wrong with my argument. Perhaps you are suggesting that the labels shaped too many habits in the beginning, and now this is all just learned behavior?
So there's some possible causality for you - perhaps we can blame the internet, iTunes and the Genius, and genre-specific streams for suggesting "more of the same". Without a broader exposure to different inputs from diverse genres, musicians aren't breaking as far out of their own genres, contributing to the sameness.
No, the Kochs are the same billionaires. They must have either figured out a way to monetize global warming, perhaps through an environment-monitoring division, or figured out that most people would rather have oil than a stable atmosphere.
Or maybe their foundation accidentally backed the wrong science. Even billionaires can hire people who make mistakes.
It's all good fun until someone puts an eye out.
Then it's hilarious with no depth perception!
One cool thing about modern equipment is it makes Test Driven Development possible. Crank in a tiny change, and check it instantly. Your turnaround is a few seconds, and refactoring makes you improve as you go. Not that you shouldnt be smart, but you're leveraging the compiler to do syntax checking instead of an overnight drop-n-pray process.
The bow is kind of a good idea, as far as safety for the family goes. A compound bow with a 70/45# draw will keep kids (and many untrained adults) from being able to wield it. And it's not like you have to use a broadhead to cow a burglar into submission with it. A target tip would still scare the snot out of anyone it is pointed at.
Of course, they're not terribly convenient in tight spaces.
I service a CNC machine at a machine shop that STILL uses paper tape. I am the only guy that will touch the old hardware so I get paid $150 an hour to tinker with the stuff. Hell they cant find a IT company that can handle DOS so I also pick up the other old machines.
I love it, 1 long afternoon/evening there and I go home with $1000 in my pocket.
This bothers me. You could easily replace the paper tape reader with a computer based solution - all the paper tape readers we had on our CNC machines 25+ years ago were interfaced with ordinary DB-25 RS-232 connections. Back then I just stuck a BlackBox short-haul modem on them to run the wires back to the foreman's office, where the other modem was plugged into an original IBM PC. A simple GW-BASIC serial program allowed them to load and store their programs to a hard disk, which was backed up nightly. It wasn't rocket surgery back then, and I have to believe the state of the art has advanced a little bit in offering hardware and software choices to do this today.
A Raspberry Pi and software from sourceforge would cost less than an hour of your time, and would open them up to lots of possibilities, not the least of which is insurance against something unfortunate happening to their only support person.
Going back one ice age. ReallY? That's a quarter as useful a going back all the way. Geez.
I should have actually said two ice ages, counting the Little Ice Age. And that was significant because it gave them two sample events to compare against the other physical evidence, not just one. Plus they were able to calibrate their shallowest samples against the last hundred years of very detailed and scientifically measured global weather data.
But yeah, they found that as their drills reached closer to bedrock, the core temperature of the Earth was warming the ice from below, significantly altering the directly measured ice temperature data. So the rest of the record of previous ice ages is derived from archaeological, geological and paleological evidence.
Anyway, it's so cool that they were able to figure this stuff out that it still amazes me.
Separately, we have a saying in India, which is drilled into the brains of BPO trainees. It says; 10=35. The IQ of an average 10-year old Indian kid is about the same as the IQ of the average 35-yr old American. Reading the many infantile responses to this article, I begin to suspect this might not be far from the truth.
Please keep in mind that a call center worker's viewpoint starts by seeing the worst of everyone. The callers are not calling 1-800-SUCCESS, they are calling 1-800-FAILURE. They have already been disappointed by whatever the product did (or didn't) do. Coupled with the fact that so many companies are using Indian call centers (because Indian English is actually quite good), and so many help desk scripts are inadequate at solving the problems they were created to handle (not the fault of the guy answering the phone), a lot of Americans have developed an association where the clipped accent means serious disappointment - fair or not, it's where we are.
Does that give one human the right to treat another like shit? Of course not. Do they? Of course - they are selfish and rude as hell around here all day long, whether they are in a movie theater being entertained or just walking down the street. I wouldn't expect them to improve their attitudes in the middle of a product failure. I wish it were different, and I raised my son to be better than that, but we can't fix everyone.
So on behalf of a minority of Americans, here's a collective "sorry".
Things constantly improve on all sides, including the quality and sophistication of attacks. But people naturally want to hang onto the old ideas in their heads, partly because they're not close to the "other" system, and partly because they don't like having their old decisions questioned or their assumptions challenged. The "Macs are perfect" idea is again proven faulty, but so are the Mac and Unix people who assign the same amount of failure to Windows 7 that they saw with Windows XP a decade ago.
It's not that Macs are "equally guilty as Windows" or that "Windows 7 is now perfect". It's just a perception thing. Human nature means that we can expect a ton of gloating and "I told you so!" kinds of responses. And while that doesn't mean a PR department is necessarily behind it, I can understand why a PR department would latch onto this and amplify it.
We had a similar problem. The security guy (not the maintenance guy) hooked up a Palm Pilot (ok, Handspring Visor) to a similarly hidden port to pop it open. He also had to set a magnet on the top of the safe, which I suspect triggered a reed switch or hall effect transistor.
thank you, at least someone gets it. We have only been keeping detailed weather records for around 100 years and now were supposed to believe that this is the hottest its ever been, thats crazy.
No, he doesn't "get it". Have you never heard of paleoclimatology? Scientists down in Antarctica have sampled cores of ice that have been trapped for millennia, and have been able to correlate the temperatures of the ice as well as trapped atmospheric particles with the time they were trapped. From them, they have determined an approximation of the average global temperature back through time, as well as estimates of things like the percentage of Earth's surface covered by wetlands based on methane levels indicating decomposed bacteria.
The Antarctic ice sheet has a pretty good record going all the way back to the previous ice age and a bit earlier. It's not like an almanac, where they can ask "what was the temperature on July 4th, 4004 BC", but they can see slow moving trends. For example, they can see a small dip that correlates to the Little Ice Age, and a more dramatic dip from an earlier ice age.
And the ice sheets aren't the only evidence. Geological records also contain clues about the earlier weather, in the forms of rock scratchings where they were pushed by glaciers, glacial moraines, ancient dried lake beds, etc. And the distribution of fossils can show where climates went from "hospitable" to "inhospitable" to certain forms of ancient life.
It's just the kind of data you need to have if you are trying to figure out if this decade is warmer than all previous decades in the last 40,000 years.
There is nothing crazy about it. It's just science.
I've never testified in front of a jury in a courtroom before, but I have heard and answered all kinds of stupid questions when giving depositions. Some are so ludicrous you have to wonder if the guy asking them is a real lawyer. So don't try to tell me what kinds of nonsense I will or won't hear coming from a lawyer - they have no problem spouting it.
Third. I only spend about a month per year in hotels, but I've never lost anything to the staff, and on every occasion I've accidentally left something behind, they have all always been great about returning it to me.
And yes, a gratuity to the housekeeping staff is always a good idea.
That's evil.
That's a lawsuit. They're pretty much indistinguishable.